SOME OF YOU, dear readers, have powerful memories of Daniel Ellsberg. You remember the impact he had on the way Americans thought about the war in Vietnam when he leaked the Pentagon Papers back in 1971. My memory is more recent. It’s from May of this year, when—in hospice care, knowing he had only weeks to live—he comforted a young whistleblower who felt her act was pointless.
Ellsberg was speaking to an audience of journalists and students at the University of California, Berkeley. He towered over the room on a giant
